


He's Been There For a While

by princecaviar



Series: No One is Fine (And That's Okay) [3]
Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Abusive Filbrick Pines, Filbrick Pines Is A Jerk, Ford Can Be Interpreted As Having PTSD But I Didn't Write Him As Having PTSD Specifically, Gen, I Figure I'd Tag It Anyway, Light Angst, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-27
Updated: 2019-07-27
Packaged: 2020-07-21 03:55:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 803
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19995448
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/princecaviar/pseuds/princecaviar
Summary: Sometimes a voice in the back of his head whispers that Ford doesn't belong here anymore. Most of the time that voice sounds like Bill, and Ford ignores it.Sometimes the voice worms it's way into Ford's thoughts and sticks there.





	He's Been There For a While

Ford was in the portal for longer than he was in his own world, and he can forget about it most of the time. But sometimes, the thought will sneak back in and eat away at him. (‘You don’t belong here anymore,’ it would say. ‘You should have died in the portal.’) Most of the time the thought sounds like Bill, and he pushes it away. Sometimes it sticks no matter how hard he tries to push it away, so he gives up and forces himself to act normal until night falls and he can slip onto the roof. He counts the stars until he can’t force his eyes to stay open anymore, then collapses in his bed. (Sometimes he’ll find Stan up there, and they’ll count the stars together like when they were little kids.)

Sometimes he wakes up in the middle of the night with a jolt. His nightmares aren’t always the same- most of the time they’re about him being back in the portal, or Bill being back. On those nights he slips into the living room and drinks coffee until morning comes. (The first night Mable and Dipper were back he found the pair of them already in the living room talking. He joined them, grateful that neither of them asked why he was up. Stan didn’t say anything when he found them in the morning, but Ford did find a bottle of sleeping pills on the counter that night.)

The nightmares that aren’t about the portal and Bill are about his dad. Filbrick Pines had been stoic at his best, and drunk and angry at his worst. Ford has more than one scar from his father’s beatings, and he knows that Stanley does too. On those nights he’ll slip into Stan’s room. (He’ll never admit it, but there’s still some small, child-like part of him that insists that his brother is safe and can keep his safe from their dad.) Stan grumbles about it being late, but he never turns Ford away. Sometimes Ford falls asleep in there, Stan’s quiet snores (and he still snores, even after half a century) lulling him to sleep. Sometimes all he needs a a few moments to remember that he and Stan are adults and their dad can’t hurt them anymore.

Fireworks were hard to get used to when he came back. The first time one of the kids had lit off a firework he had thought he was back in one of the thousands of war-torn dimensions he had come across. He was behind the couch with a blaster in his hand before he realized what was happening. (He still had to work on not giving children dangerous weapons, though as the twins get older, it’s becoming less of a problem.)

Sometimes he sits in his lab and just stares at the portal for hours at a time, an odd mixture of sadness, disgust, and anger in his chest. (He still can’t believe that Bill tricked him. He takes some comfort in the fact that he isn’t the only person Bill had tricked over time.) Someone always comes down to retrieve him after a while, whether it’s Stan, one of the kids, or even Soos or Wendy.

Everyone once in a while he found himself feeling out of place in the new, modern world with technology that no one had even thought of when he had disappeared. (He’d seen more than his fair share of advanced tech while dimension-hopping, but he’d never gotten a chance to use much of it. He’d never really stayed in one place for too long.) Dipper and Mabel helped a lot with that- for everything he taught them about the supernatural weirdness in Gravity Falls, they taught him something about how his world had changed and advanced.

Even with the help of the children, sometimes Ford feels like he can’t breathe, overwhelmed by the progress the world had made without him. Sometimes he hides away in a safe part of the forest and wishes that he was still at Backupsmore with Fiddleford. (He missed Fiddleford with a passion but he still couldn’t bring himself to see him. He blamed himself for his best friend’s current mental state- it was Ford’s fault that Fidds had seen things so horrible he had felt the need to use a memory gun on himself.)

Ford drinks too much coffee and sleeps too little, and sometimes he steals the cigarettes that Stan had hidden after the kids came. He falls asleep while working more often than he should, and sometimes he goes to say something only to realize that English doesn’t have the words for it. He’s a little out of place in the world he was born to, but he doesn’t mind it as much as he thought he would.


End file.
